Tahir Hamut Izgil

Tahir Hamut Izgil was born in 1969 in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang to a farming family. He is a writer, film director and is considered one of the most prominent modern poets in the Uyghur language.

Izgil studied in Beijing, where he learned Mandarin and intensively studied Chinese avant-garde poetry and Western literature. After completing his studies, he returned to Xinjiang, worked as a Mandarin teacher and made a name for himself with his poems, in which he radically departed from traditional forms and content. When he tried to leave China to study in Turkey, he was arrested in 1996 on flimsy grounds and interned for three years. After his release, he founded a production company and worked outside the state system as a director, while continuing to write poetry, which has been translated into many languages. In 2017, when the Chinese government began the mass internment of Uyghurs, he and his family managed to flee into exile in America.

In »Waiting to Be Arrested at Night« (2023), the author describes, soberly and without political or accusatory rhetoric, how conditions in Xinjiang worsened from 2016 onwards. Schools, government offices and even hospitals were transformed into escape-proof »study centers« within a matter of days. A high-tech, but essentially human-based surveillance state was installed. What does it mean to live in constant fear of being arrested and tortured at night? How do you communicate with like-minded people when someone could be listening in everywhere? And how do you manage to escape from the clutches of a totalitarian regime? »Izgil’s memoir is a story about how to survive in, and to negotiate one’s way through, a society in which repression has become routine, and the power of the state is unfettered. The book’s restraint is also its strength«. (Guardian)

Tahir Hamut Izgil lives in Washington.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide
Hanser
München, 2024
[Ü: Ulrike Kretschmer]